By the time the house had fully woken, Tom already hated his own impatience; it sat in him like a splinter.
Every ordinary sound — voices, footsteps, the scrape of the bench, the clatter of crockery — only tightened the string within him further. He wanted to abandon everything, go out the door, measure the world in footsteps, wrest an answer from it by force, check every date, every small thing, every old landmark all at once. Instead he had to sit at the table, eat warm porridge, answer when spoken to, and look as much like an ordinary boy as was at all possible when a few hours ago he had, in the most literal sense, returned from the Last Reach.
His mother kept glancing at him.
Not sharply. Not so anxiously that the others would notice. But Tom could see it. She sensed something was wrong. Perhaps only the aftermath of a bad dream. Perhaps a little deeper.
He was careful not to meet her gaze for longer than necessary.
His father was talking about something unremarkable — the weather, work, a neighbour's cow that had broken through the fence again. One of his brothers yawned so hugely it seemed he might swallow half the morning. Another snorted at that. The house was living its ordinary life, cramped and noisy and tiresome and infinitely dear.
But all of it was running in the background. Tom was listening not to the words but to the markers: the order of conversations, the weather outside, which tasks his father intended to finish by evening, what had already been put away, what still stood in the pantry, what the porridge was, even how many logs remained by the hearth. Foolish, small, necessary.
His memory worked in fragments. Not because it had weakened — if anything, the opposite: there were too many layers in it, and now he had to sort through them again, not confusing the years he had lived through with this long-lost starting point. He had lived forward for too long to easily return to the days when nothing had yet begun.
Even so, a few things were already settling into shape: early autumn, not yet truly cold, enough time remaining before the day they would come for him to prepare — if he wasted none of it.
How much time exactly — that was still to be determined.
Tom ate slowly, tasting almost nothing. Not because the food was poor. Simply because right now it was part of a task, not a pleasure. Everything around him had become part of a task.
— Tom.
He raised his head too quickly.
His mother was looking at him calmly, but with that particular soft attention that always made him want to either tell the truth or flee the room.
— Were you listening?
Hell.
— Yes, he answered.
Too fast.
His father gave a dry sound.
— If you were listening, tell me what I said.
That sort of test would once have caught him off guard. Not now. Tom ran the last few sentences back through his memory without difficulty.
— That you'll look over the west fence this evening if the rain holds off, he said evenly.
His father made a satisfied, inarticulate sound and returned to his food. His mother held Tom's gaze for a second or two longer, then also looked away.
Tom took another sip of water.
He could not let himself drift so visibly — not here, not now. If his mother grew more anxious than usual, it would complicate everything immediately.
He needed a day outside, a few hours at least: air, the road, the old landmarks.
After the meal, the chance came of its own accord.
His father sent one of the younger boys to the barn for something, another for water, and Tom received a brief:
— Since you're moving like a sleepy fly anyway, walk down to the lower meadow. See if that fence has come apart after the wet.
In another life he would have nodded without really listening.
Now he barely kept himself from agreeing too quickly.
— Right.
His mother looked up at him.
— Don't wander off.
Tom paused slightly.
— I won't.
That was also true. At any rate, the part of the truth that could be allowed.
He stepped out of the house and stopped at once on the threshold.
Morning struck him in the face with damp cold and the smell of earth. Grey haze hung above the hills. The grass in the yard gleamed with the night's wet. Somewhere far off a bird called.
The world looked too peaceful. Tom breathed in slowly: not smoke, not blood, not burning — just wet earth, wood, dung, autumn grass and smoke from the chimney.
He started down the familiar path, unhurried on the outside, frantic on the inside. His legs remembered the way, but his body still felt wrong. His stride shorter. His balance easier to break if he turned too sharply. His breathing a shade faster than it ought to be. He noted these things without any particular self-pity.
Fixable.
The lower meadow was where it should be; so was the fence, the slope, the old stone by the path, the three crooked trees further along the field's edge. It all matched.
Tom walked the length of the fence without really looking at it. He was checking other things. The wheel-ruts on the road. The place where a neighbour's cart had sunk the previous autumn. The depression in the ground by the old pit. None of this would seem to matter, but small things like these kept a chronology more honestly than big ones. Great events, memory tends to exaggerate. Daily life does not.
He crouched by the wet soil and touched the edge of a track with his fingertips.
Recent.
Ordinary.
So far everything was close enough to what it should have been.
Tom straightened and looked further along, to where beyond the field the old path led into the copse. In his previous life he had walked that path many times long before he understood how much such roads could matter. Then it had simply been a path. Now he saw it differently.
A threshold.
A test.
If his memory held, there should be a half-rotted trunk by the stream beyond the copse — a tree struck by lightning that summer. A little further, a stone with a notch like a claw-mark. And beyond it...
Tom frowned.
Beyond it there should have been nothing. Just a choked hollow. Nothing of consequence.
He couldn't quite say why that had surfaced in his memory so clearly. Perhaps because he needed at least some set of landmarks outside the house right now. Or perhaps because that path had always felt unpleasant, even then, though he hadn't understood why.
He looked back at the house, barely visible from this distance, then turned decisively towards the copse.
He wasn't going to go far. Only to check. Only to compare.
The wood met him with damp, the smell of leaves, and a shadow deeper than it ought to have been at this hour. The ground squelched underfoot. Branches caught at his sleeves. Tom walked slowly, noting everything by habit: the place where the path widened; the old stump on the right; the broken hazel bush. Yes. Yes. That too.
No changes yet.
He reached the stream and stopped.
The trunk was in place.
The stone with the notch too.
Tom was almost ready to let out a breath, half-irritated at his own tension, when he noticed the ground on the far side of the stream.
A track.
Not human.
He went still.
On the dark wet soil there was a clear impression — as though something with a narrow paw and fingers too long had stepped right at the water's edge, and then vanished. Tom crouched beside it, not touching. The track was fresh. So fresh that the edge had not yet blurred with moisture.
A cold unease settled in his stomach.
Not here. Not now.
In his previous life, at this point in time, there had been nothing like this in this spot. He was certain of that — not because he remembered every blade of grass, but because he had come here later, deliberately, already knowing what to look for. And the place had been quiet then. Empty. Simply unpleasant.
Tom stood up slowly.
Right. A coincidence? A stray creature? Something that had wandered in early? Or was this already the first divergence?
He made himself look around without haste.
To the left, low wet bushes. To the right, a stand of hazel. The air was damp, the silence ordinary. Almost.
Tom frowned and drew the air in through his nose.
Beneath the smell of water and leaves was something else. Faint. Fetid. With an edge of wet fur.
He knew that smell.
Dimly. Not clearly enough to name the creature, but clearly enough to know: this was not a fox, not a dog, not anything that ought to be prowling this close to the house at this time of year.
He stepped back.
Then again.
The right thing to do now was to leave, remember, check later, with a weapon and with proper strength. His adult memory told him this plainly.
The body of a boy, by contrast, wanted to stand still and listen.
Tom clenched his fist.
That's how people die, he told himself. Standing in place one heartbeat longer than they ought.
He was already turning to go when the bushes to his right rustled quietly.
Not with any crack or thrash — with a sliding sound.
Tom stepped back once more, shifting his weight automatically into a stance.
And immediately felt how poor it was.
Shoulders too high, weight not quite right, his knee coming forward more slowly than it should. His mind knew what was needed; his body lagged behind.
The branches shifted.
Something grey and narrow and too low to the ground darted from the shadow between them.
Tom reached sharply for his belt — nothing there, of course. Only a knife: small, plain, a working knife. Not a weapon against any serious creature, but better than bare hands.
He drew it and backed towards the stream to cut off any approach from behind.
The silence thickened.
Then the creature showed itself again, more plainly. Small, wiry, with a long muzzle, a sleek grey hide, and eyes in which there was no ordinary animal intelligence. A boggartish thing — not the worst of what he had faced, but far from harmless. This close to the house, already a bad sign.
It pressed down towards the ground.
Tom went still too.
It'll jump.
He understood this a moment before the movement came, but still barely managed.
His body responded more slowly than he wanted. He stepped aside, almost correctly, but not quite. The creature clipped his shoulder, raking its claws across the cloth. Tom swore and drove the knife upwards more from memory than from any real confidence.
The blade skidded across the creature's flank. Shallow.
Not enough.
It turned faster than something that size had any right to.
Tom fell back again, feeling his heart driving blood into his ears. Not fear — calculation. The difference mattered. Fear got in the way. Calculation narrowed the world down to what was needed.
Short knife, fast creature, slippery ground, the stream a hindrance to them both.
He met the second lunge better.
He shifted, let his left arm take only a glancing blow, and drove the knife into the creature's neck.
This time deeper.
The creature shrieked — horribly, almost like a human sound — and lunged backward. Tom did not pursue. Only idiots with a boy's body, a small knife and uncertain footing go after a wounded creature into undergrowth.
He kept the knife up, breathing through his nose.
Blood dripped from the blade into the stream.
A few more seconds of rustling in the bushes. Then silence.
Tom stood without moving until he was certain the sound would not return.
Only then did he let himself breathe out.
His shoulder stung. Not badly. More a scratch than a wound.
He looked down at the tracks by the water, the smeared mud, the dark drops on the leaves.
Good.
Now it could be said with certainty: this was not a failure of memory. Something like this should not have been here. Not at this time.
Tom wiped the blade slowly on the wet grass.
First divergence.
Not a catastrophe, not an ending — but enough to knock out of him the last boyish hope that he could simply walk the old road more carefully and thereby fix everything.
No.
The road had already changed.
He looked over the wood one more time, now with sharper attention. Branches. Tracks. The direction the creature had fled. Almost immediately his mind began running through possibilities: had it come alone, had something drawn it here, was there a lair nearby, who else might have noticed.
That was familiar: not panic, but work.
Tom put away the knife and gingerly touched his shoulder. Painful, but bearable. At home he would have to lie about a branch or a thorn. Not the hardest lie he had ever told.
He stepped toward the path and stopped again.
On the ground a little further along, among the hazel roots, something gleamed faintly.
Tom frowned, crouched, and parted the wet leaves.
A small round object, half pressed into the mud.
He picked it up between two fingers.
A coin.
Old. Too old to have ended up here by chance. On one side an almost-worn pattern; on the other, something like crossed lines and a crescent moon, barely visible beneath the tarnish of years.
Tom stared at it.
No. This had not been here either. Or should not have been.
He had no memory of this coin at all.
Not merely forgotten. Unrecognised.
From the coin came a faint chill — not strong, but real.
Tom closed it in his fist and felt an unpleasant tremor move from the skin up to his wrist.
The crossroads.
Or something near that symbol.
Coincidence?
After the Last Reach, the word coincidence felt almost childish.
He put the coin in his pocket.
Then straightened.
That alone was enough: his memories were no longer firm ground underfoot.
Tom looked through the trees to where the house lay beyond the copse.
His mother would have noticed if he had been gone too long.
It was time to go back.
But as he stepped onto the path he caught himself walking differently.
A little more compact. A little harder. Without the foolish part of hope that had been whispering all morning: perhaps it will be similar enough, if only you don't make mistakes.
No.
Mistakes were now twice as costly.
Because the enemy was not only the old powers.
The enemy was becoming the very unpredictability of the new road.
When the house appeared ahead of him again, Tom already knew he could not simply wait and see.
He would have to check the world again, from the beginning, and start training earlier than he had wanted.
He gripped the old coin in his pocket.
The metal was cold.
Almost as cold as the air at the crossroads between life and death.
Tom said nothing aloud.